


sink graceless to the dirt

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Baltimore Crabs (Blaseball Team), Blooddrain Weather, Body Horror, Gen, Season 10 Day 46, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27809209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: The scoreboard puts it sodelicately.The blooddrain gurgles; one player siphons from another. And that’s fine, that’s good, there are kids in the crowd, but Sutton can’t help but resent the clinicism of the description. There is nothingdelicateabout getting blooddrained.
Relationships: Sutton Dreamy & Kennedy Loser, Sutton Dreamy & Nagomi Mcdaniel
Comments: 18
Kudos: 40





	sink graceless to the dirt

**Author's Note:**

> fuck blooddrains! to reiterate, warning here for gratuitous descriptions of blood and violence. there's also swearing.
> 
> i'm a big fan of the violence in blaseball between players being both desperate and purposeful, so here we are! i got the idea for blooddrain also having literal blood rain from [@cryptidgay,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay) whose fics i absolutely cannot recommend highly enough. shoutout to reblase as per usual (you can find this game's play by play [here](https://reblase.sibr.dev/game/92b89ba6-6ee7-42ee-b2de-fc0b3244c937))! i think that's all i had to say here, and thanks for reading!

The thing about blooddrains is that they’re fucking  _ messy. _ The scoreboard puts it so delicately. The blooddrain gurgles; one player siphons from another. And that’s fine, that’s good, there are kids in the crowd, but Sutton can’t help but resent the clinicism of the description. There is nothing  _ delicate _ about getting blooddrained. 

Blooddrain games go like this: blood rains from the sky, dark and thick and slippery on the short-cropped grass. When it rains, it pours. It always rains. It always pours. 

Blooddrain games go like this: Nagomi’s hair is stuck to her forehead by a thin film of the stuff, and Sutton’s blinking it desperately out of her eyes, and it’s saturated the pitching mound, Moco’s cleats sinking wetly into the sludge with every windup. The hitters hold on to their bats even tighter as the slick dark liquid drips from the handles.The clouds are a dark, apocalyptic grey, red seeping in at the edges. It’s hard to see through the downpour, and the stadium lights don’t do much in the way of illuminating the field. It’s hard to see much further than the pitching mound from the outfield, let alone the pale speck of the red-splattered ball sailing up toward the stands. 

Blooddrain games go like this: Sutton isn’t paying as much attention as she should be. 

Nagomi’s already siphoned from someone this game, and the fact that a draining’s happened makes her think she’s safe somehow. Everybody tries to look the other way. It’s not pretty no matter who’s doing the draining. Better with Nagomi, given the horrifyingly sharp crab mandible jutting out of her jaw, alien and dull pink, but not everybody has a mouth made for tearing things apart, some people just have blunt human teeth and—

She steps up to the plate and taps the bat against the base. Once, twice. The same comforting thuds that they’ve always been for the last decade. It’s ritualistic, almost; a question asked and an answer given. Sutton will survive this pitch, this game, this season. She will survive until she doesn’t. 

Combs Estes stares her down from the mound. She can’t remember where they came from. There was a point in time where Sutton had a general sense of who everyone was, which team they were on, what position they played, but that was before people started dying so fast she didn’t even have time to learn their replacement’s name before the damn replacement was gone, too. It’s easier not to care. Never try and learn in the first place. Protect your own in whatever useless ways you can.

Estes, whoever they are, is average height. Muscular in the way all pitchers have to be. Has a massive pompadour with shaved sides. She gets the sense that that’s their brand, sort of, the thing that they’re trying to make iconic to the fans, the thing that people will remember enough to miss when they’re gone.  _ Never forget Combs Estes, rest in violence. You know, that Jazz Hands pitcher? The one with the pompadour?  _

Hard to say if it’ll work. Sutton has her doubts. But far stranger things have happened here. 

She’s readying her bat to swing, and nothing is wrong besides the usual. And the usual is. Well. There is so much wrong with the world that you have to erase it all, start from a new threshold. Nothing is wrong because nothing can be wrong because if you think about everything that is definitely, definitely wrong, everything all so wrong and you can’t go back and gods know the point of no return was almost a fucking decade ago if it ever existed in the first place and there’s no getting out, there’s no getting out, there’s no getting out for anyone—you’ll crack and then that’s it. 

So she doesn’t think about that. She thinks about about how much easier it’ll be to steal a base when the defense has to stop to wipe blood off their face every thirty seconds. She thinks about Estes' earned run average. She thinks about her own on base percentage. 

The night vision goggles, a blessing from—three years ago? four? five? it doesn’t matter—keep the blood out of her eyes, keep her lashes from sticking together with it. They don’t do much else. They were supposed to help her see better in the solar eclipses, which they do, she guesses, but an edge that slight really doesn’t make a difference in the long run. 

The bat is heavy in her hands. Everything is so heavy. Blood runs down her hands in thick rivulets, soaks into her uniform, weighs it down. Some part of her wonders whose blood for just a moment, and then she stops wondering because Estes is barreling toward her, ball and glove left forgotten on the mound. She knows what comes next. Behind her, the rogue ump stays crouched, white eyes unblinking. It will not stop Estes. If she tries to run, it will hold her still. 

Estes’ teeth are bared. They skid to a stop in front of her, and their hands shoot out to clutch her forearms vice-tight. The crowd is silent as the trench. Play will stop until Sutton allows this to happen, so she lets her bat thud to the ground, fingers shaking. 

“You don’t have to do this,” she says, and she is proud that her voice does not quiver. 

Their lip curls. “Neither did your siphon. You didn’t seem so bothered about that.” Nagomi, hunched over Steph Weeks, pinning him to home base with her claw. No, she supposes it didn’t bother her much then. That probably makes her selfish. She doesn’t care. 

“I could kill you.” 

“Anybody could kill anybody,” they say, “but you won’t,” and they lift Sutton’s right arm up to their face and bite. 

The pain is burning and immediate, and despite herself, she tries to twist out of their grip with a shout lost in the gleeful baying of the crowd. She can see the fans leaping to their feet in the stands, faces twisted into openmouthed grins, fists thrust into the air. Combs’ teeth scrape over her skin, an ugly, clumsy tearing, and the hordes only scream their approval louder, and she forces herself into stillness and wishes every soft part of her was carcinized, wishes she were nothing but armor and armor and armor. Their jaw works unnaturally as they bite for the second time, the third, fighting for the angle that will allow them the best access to her blood with their short blunt teeth, and she wants to retch when she looks at her own flesh peeled back uneven but the sight is not unfamiliar; no grotesquery is anymore. She can feel their tongue on the wound. 

After an eternity, Estes drops her arm and exhales hard, her blood smeared down their chin and across their cheeks. It doesn’t look any different from anything else in the downpour, and they don’t apologize. Good. There is nothing these days that disgusts her more than false guilt.

She punches them in the nose anyway as soon as they’ve let go of her. More blood for the already-saturated soil. They catch themselves on a backflung hand and spit red onto the ground and look her in the eye and turn and stalk back to where the glove and ball lie abandoned, and Sutton’s mind is blank. Safer that way, probably. Thinking about any horror of these past ten years rarely goes well. 

She bleeds into the ground. Her other arm is only newly healed from the last time she was drained, barely more than a couple weeks ago, but at least the last siphon had sharp teeth, a clean slice at the inside of her elbow and done. Estes could get a knife for the job. They don’t. Brutality is a choice. Escape never is.

Lifts her bat again, stands at the ready. Swing and a miss. The catcher tosses the ball back to Estes. She manages a hit off the next pitch but it pops off too high and too far left, falls down again well out of bounds. The third throw she doesn’t even try, just props herself up on her bat with her good arm and watches the ball go by, landing wetly in the catcher’s mitt. 

Parra’s already on their way out of the dugout, bat clenched so tight in their hands that their knuckles are going white, eyes wide, cap pulled low over their face. “Are you—” 

“Fine,” she grits out. “Or. I will be.” 

“Gods,” they mumble, and they step up to the plate.

Nagomi is at her side the second she’s back in the dugout, silently offering one of the many damp washcloths they keep piled by the benches for these games. The other Crabs lurch to their feet, all distressed clamoring, hands outstretched to her, and Sutton freezes, but Nagomi puts herself between them and her, motions for quiet. Sutton nods in weary thanks and begins to wipe at the blood. 

At a certain point the metallic stench of it fades into the background but the feel of it dripping down the skin, that never gets normal, it can’t. Getting rid of the blood between innings is a luxury, a holdover from the seasons where they weren’t playing a blooddrain game every few days, but Kennedy pushes the buckets of water toward her, eyes cast down. He’s guilty, she knows, but there’s nothing she can do about that except to take what help he can offer her. 

She pulls the goggles off her face and tosses them to the ground next to her gym bag. Cleans off her face, then her neck, then her arms. All the exposed flesh. No point in trying to get the stains out of the uniform, she knows, and she doesn’t bother. 

There’s the matter of the open wound, then. Nagomi kneels at her side, bottle of hydrogen peroxide already in her broad hand. 

“I am sorry, Dreamy, but this will hurt,” she says unnecessarily. 

It does. 

Kennedy and Nagomi bandage the wound together, Kennedy with teeth digging into his lower lip and shoulders hunched, Nagomi with an unreadable face and steady hand. 

“I’m sorry,” Kennedy bursts out finally. The other Crabs, milling wordless around the dugout, all turn to look. At home base, Silvaire’s taking her second swing, another foul hit to nowhere. 

“It’s alright,” Sutton says. “Nothing you could have done.” 

“That doesn’t make it better,” he mutters. “Please, Sutton, just stay in the dugout for the next inning. Get something to drink, something to eat. Nagomi has good enough defense that she can probably cover left field while you’re out—” 

She scoffs, arm cradled to her chest. “Do you really think the umpires would let me stay behind?” 

Tense silence. There’s never been an incineration outside solar eclipse weather, as far as Sutton knows, but the idea of expecting any safety at all in this whole damned game is laughable. 

Silvaire’s at the mouth of the dugout, throwing her bat and helmet inside. “I’m sorry, y’all,” she says. “Inning’s over. We gotta....” She jerks a thumb toward the field. 

Kennedy lets out a long breath, turns despairing eyes to the dark ceiling of the dugout, where the blood drums on the roof. “Nobody even got on base, did they?”  _ Against the fucking Jazz Hands, of all teams, _ he doesn’t say, but everyone winces anyway. 

“Sorry,” Silvaire repeats, voice cracking. “I tried. I just...” 

“I know you did,” Kennedy murmurs, gentle, then sighs again and looks around at them. “Well. Let’s go.” 

They go. Sutton stands in the outfield, and she watches blood soak into the clean white bandage.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading this! this was a bad game for the crabs on many levels. love em. also, if you felt like leaving a kudos or comment, that would absolutely make my day! <3


End file.
